


Nick Backstrom Vs. The World

by angularmomentum



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Comedy, Edging, Fighting, Idiots in Love, M/M, Multi, Teeth, improbable timeframes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-22
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-07-15 11:52:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16062560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angularmomentum/pseuds/angularmomentum
Summary: Dating Sasha comes with a few challenges.Or: sometimes you have to lose some teeth to win a fight.





	Nick Backstrom Vs. The World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [junkeroni (hotdammneron)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotdammneron/gifts).



> Dear Junkeroni, I hope this hits at least a few of your likes! I didn’t go too far into an AU but I did go wildly overboard with grimy fools deeply, stupidly in love with each other. Enjoy! You wrote a really fun Dear Author letter. Lots of stuff I like to do. Melded with something I saw on the kinkmeme and couldn’t stop thinking about, it worked out great.
> 
> Additional notes/warnings at the end! Click down to know more.

Nicke shows up at Sasha’s as soon as he hears the news.

Sasha is already drunk when he gets there, which seems par for the course, honestly. Nicke has never broken up with anyone, but he’s seen movies. He knows how it’s supposed to go. It stings that it doesn’t seem like it was entirely by choice, but that’s hockey. So few of them get a say in where they live and who they play for. It’s a chance to get in the show, at the end of the day.

“I can come in?” He offers, when Sasha, shirtless and swaying against his own doorframe, just stares blearily at him. Nicke brandishes the (very good, thank you) Swedish vodka he’s carrying. “I have booze.”

“Okay,” Sasha says, mustering a smile. “You catch up.”

-

Sasha kisses him full on the lips with a mouthful of vodka.

Nicke opens up to let it in, soft and warm and acrid, swallowing it all save the trickle that slips down his chin.

Sasha goes to sleep mostly on top of him, both of them sacked out on the couch, too hammered to go any further towards the stairs.

Sasha’s weight is crushing the buzzing out of Nicke’s brain. He smells like vodka and sleep and that weird perfume he uses, and his chest hair is softer than anyone’s fucking should be.

If Sema had to get traded, at least they’re giving him a fitting tribute. He’d be laughing his bony ass off.

-

“Wow, you guys look like crap,” Greenie says at practice the next morning. “What did you do, bathe each other in vodka?”

Nicke, too hungover to speak, washes Greenie’s face with the underside of his nastiest glove, watching Sasha leaning on his stick in the corner.

He sees Nicke looking. He’s trying his absolute hardest to smile.

Nicke’s heart lurches in his chest, a sensation like indigestion heating him from the inside. It feels terrible. Almost as terrible as the heats they have to skate when it emerges Nicke and Ovi have been drinking on a school night.

Nicke pukes. Ovi doesn’t.

Fucking Russian Machine. Nicke wants to kiss him until he's breathless. Nicke wants to punch someone in the face.

-

Operation: Fight! Turns out to be harder than Nicke was anticipating, mostly because once Greenie hears about it he won’t stop giggling.

-

“Here’s the thing,” Greenie had said to him once in some terminally beige hotel lobby in Toronto, when Nicke was a rookie and Greenie was only one season up from Hershey. “Alex has some baggage.”

“Luggage?” Nicke had tried to make sense of the word from context and failed. “He don’t bring bags for away, he’s just buying new stuff always.” He’d looked over at Alex, biting playfully at Sema’s ear with his newly-gapped teeth while Sema grimaced and pretended to swat him away. He was wearing a brand new t-shirt from the airport gift shop he’d made them all stop at with “N A S T Y” on it in red sequins.

The fact that Nicke can remember exactly what Sasha was wearing when Greenie explained that dating Alex was more complicated than it seemed is probably a good indicator of how long he’s been holding a candle. Metaphorically, of course. His arms are still pretty tired, though.

-

It’s not like Nicke has been pining in secret. For one thing that’s pathetic and creepy after a while, and he’d feel pretty fucking awful about it if Sema getting traded and he and Alex breaking up was some sort of eureka moment for Nicke to swoop in and be Sasha’s epic rebound.

For another, it’s not like Sema didn’t know.

They’ve had enough threesomes to make it slightly weird in the other direction, and Mike and Nicke have been blowing each other weekly for long enough that their friendship is pretty much just wingmanning each other into bed when they both strike out with hotties in bars. It was all at a careful equilibrium, and hockey came first.

Now, sometimes he and Mike have the occasional real conversation, which Nicke both dreads and cherishes. Ovi is a wrecking ball on the ice, but Mike has the emotional finesse of a daytime talk show host.

“Look,” he says, when Nicke has come over to pretend he’s not hoping to get off in his stupid hot tub, steam wreathing them both while their beers slowly go flat on the decking. “I’m not saying you can’t try, just that you won’t win. Besides, Sema knows all your moves, and you’ve only got, like, two.”

Nicke’s head thumps back against the moulded plastic, steam clearing just enough for him to see the light pollution obscuring DC’s stars. “Does it count if I just fight them?”

“No, man.” Mike rolls his eyes. “You gotta _defeat_ his exes. Those are the rules.”

“Stupid rules,” Nicke mutters, slipping down so the bubbles cover his mouth and tickle his nose.

“Hey, don’t be like that. Maybe Ovi would be cool with a casual thing? Have you asked?”

 _You and I both know Sasha hasn’t got a casual heart_ Nicke thinks, but it’s in Swedish and he can’t be bothered to try to translate it, so he just shakes his head.

Mike kicks him under the water. “Hey, cheer up. At least if you try you might learn to fight.”

Nicke spits a stream of heavily chlorinated water at him, then immediately regrets putting it in his mouth. He knows exactly what’s happened in this hot tub, and none of it is hygienic.

Mike shrugs, turning the bubbles up. “Fine, sulk then. You want me to blow you or not?”

Nicke does.

-

Nicke and Sasha don’t have stalls next to each other, but they’re often the first ones in for morning skates. It’s become something of a routine without them ever talking about it.

Nicke texts him _skate?_ at three in the morning when he’s lying awake with Mike snoring next to him. Nicke gently closes his mouth and rolls him over, used to it from years of roadies. Mike just starts snoring again, but it’s a fun game while he waits for Sasha to reply.

 _ok_ Sasha says.

By five in the morning they’re both at the rink, bumping shoulders as they lace up their skates.

It takes until they’re on the ice for Nicke to figure out what he wants to say, by which time Sasha has already knocked him into the boards before taking off for a hot lap, skidding to a stop breathless and smiling. “Why do I have to fight your exes?” Nicke blurts out, slamming into him before dodging out of reach. “Why I can’t just ask you out?”

Sasha bolts towards him, skidding to a snowdrift half just in front of him, soaking his sweatpants to the thighs. This close he throws off heat like a fireplace, comforting and elemental. “They form league,” Sasha says, putting him in a gentle headlock. “Is… to protect.”

Nicke could stay here forever, damp and close. He still makes an effort to wriggle away, wanting to keep playing. “That’s so stupid.”

Sasha grins at him, skating away backwards, miming _come get me_ with his big hands, bare fingertips red in the cold. “Yeah.”

Nicke feints left before barreling straight for him, poking him in the ribs in the spot where he’s ticklish, grinning when Sasha grunts and swats him away. “Why do _you_ need protecting?”

Sasha’s smile doesn't change shape, exactly, but something about it leaves his eyes, and Nicke feels like shit down to his hair in an instant. He already knows the answer to that. It’s only the most obvious thing in the world. A heart that big and that open can’t help but get battered by the world. Nicke isn’t used to thinking of himself as any particular kind of person, but right then he really hopes he’s at least on the better side.

“I’ll race you,” Nicke says thickly, even though Sasha always wins. They work so well together on the ice because Nicke can see it better than anyone else, and he’s been helping Sasha’s shadow grow longer and longer for years. He’s always been fine with being in it. He’s always been fine with starting fights Sasha finishes.

He’s never had to fight _for_ him before. It turns out to be a pretty easy decision, all things considered. Nicke never really expected to keep all his teeth anyway.

He didn’t get to where he is by giving up easy.

-

Nicke likes to make plans.

Sometimes he even secretly makes lists, reminders to himself of the things he wants to do, things he wants: _play in the NHL_ hidden under his childhood bed in a box, _work on glutes_ taped to the fridge under his diet plan so nobody will see.

Nicke writes _learn to fight_ on a napkin during a team lunch when Sasha is holding court in Tampa Bay, toasting them all with his third coke and laughing it out of his nose.

He stashes it in his suit pocket, letting his fingers graze it every so often, just to tell himself to do it.

Don't stop thinking about it.

-

Wardo laughs in his face at the gym for almost a solid minute when Nicke asks him for help, eventually calling Carly over to make sure he’s heard Nicke right, as though Nicke still has the trouble with English he laboured under when he first got here.

Wardo stops chuckling long enough to wheeze: “go on Backy, tell Carly what you said!”

Nicke bites his tongue for patience. “I need to learn how to fight.” Carly bursts out laughing. Nicke punches him in the arm. It hurts his hand a lot more than he was expecting it to. “Ow.”

Carly claps him on the shoulder, big, sleepy eyes amused. “You gotta put your back into it.”

“I’ll put my back in _you,_ ” Nicke mutters mutinously.

“Do it again,” Carly says, putting up a hand. “Right there. Square your hips. Stay solid, okay?”

Wardo kicks his legs a little wider. “Use that low center of gravity, bud.”

Nicke wails a punch at Carly’s palm. It hits with a satisfying _thwack._ Carly doesn’t even flinch.

“What’s all this about, anyway?” Carly asks, when Nicke has done it three times in a row. “Someone piss you off? Erik refused to blow you at Nationals and now you’re getting revenge? You know winning games is better than a punch in the face, right? I mean, you win us games already.”

There are very few secrets on a hockey team. Nicke went to Carly’s wedding. Nicke has passed out on Wardo’s shoulder on plane rides and sprayed him with any number of drinks. They’ve all seen each other's dicks so often Nicke could probably pick them out of a lineup.

“I just need to, okay?” he says, in case it all goes tits up and he ends up laid out for the season. He’s not particularly superstitious, but a wise woman (his mother) once told him gently not to count hens before they’re in the henhouse, and Nicke always took that to mean it took more work than it might seem to get chickens to roost.

He grew up in the middle of nowhere, most of his metaphors are pastoral.

-

One of the things Nicke loves most about Sasha is that he’s always got a smile ready. It might not always be what he wants to be doing, but he’s always ready to put aside his mood for a kid, or someone whose day he’s genuinely made by showing up and existing. Maybe not for reporters, but nobody could possibly blame hi for that when they’ve taken his good nature and abundance of joy and twisted it into a sellable narrative at his expense.

Nicke invites himself along on one of his grocery store trips after they’ve both been available to the media and Nicke can see his own exhaustion mirrored in Sasha’s eyes.

Nicke wants a beer and some chips. Nicke wants to listen to Sasha’s horrible Russian music and let him sing along in his deep, tone-deaf voice with a minimum of gentle teasing.

Nicke gets in his car and Sasha smiles at him. “You pick the music,” Nicke says.

“Yeah, is my car,” Sasha points out. “What you want, Nicky?”

Nicke stares at him for a second, wondering if he’s being asked what he wants from the store. “I want to date you,” he blurts, immediately mortified. “I want to…look at you.”

Sasha rests the tip of his finger on the very end of Nicke’s nose, pressing just a little. “You break face for me I get mad,” he says quietly. “I like this face.”

“Enough to let me do it?”

Sasha takes his hand away to put the car in gear. “Fedya is come here next month for meeting. He’s sending me texts sometimes, see how is going. We friends still.”

Nicke swallows thickly. “You starting me off easy?”

Sasha grins at him, screeching out into traffic with his foot flat to the floor, tires squeaking on the damp street. “You think Fedya is easy? I tell him you say that.”

Nicke swats him, laughing despite himself.

-

 _Here_ turns out to be Toronto in the preseason for some hall of fame thing, and Sergei Fedorov, despite being in his forties and therefore ancient, turns out to be a lot bigger than Nicke remembers from his rookie season.

Nicke doesn’t consider the Leafs to be a threat, so it’s an exercise in anticipation: how will he find Fedya? How will he approach him? Will there be witnesses?

They win the game and Nicke barely remembers it. He’s playing on autopilot. His autopilot is top of the line, but still, he lacks creativity. He’s a little slow in the face-offs.

Sasha shoulders him in the tunnel, sweaty and huge and warm, big eyes bright in the gloom as he knocks their foreheads together. “You want kiss for luck?”

“Can we?” Nicke mumbles.

“If nobody see us.”

Nicke takes him by the cheeks, thumbs resting on those ferociously high cheekbones, stubble rough under his palms. All the wonderful asymmetry of Sasha’s warrior face in his hands. “Blueball me,” Nicke says thickly. “Make me wait for it.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to win.”

Sasha doesn’t kiss him. Nicke wants to kick his _own_ ass.

-

“Hey, Nicky,” someone yells into the locker room. “There’s some Russian guy in the parking lot for you? Says you’re friends?”

“All my Russian friends are here,” Nicke says before his brain catches up, mostly out of his pads but not yet into his clothes.

Sasha meets his eyes across the locker room. Nicke yanks on a hoodie and goes to throw down with a legend.

-

Toronto in October is definitely chillier than DC, but it must be warmer than Moscow because Fedya is smoking a cigarette in a crisp button-down shirt and leaning against a pillar with his ankles crossed.

Nicke, usually able to conjure some insulating confidence, feels very young all of a sudden. Memory has a way of doing that. He remembers idolising him, trying to dissect his game, his years of skill. Trying to figure out what Sasha saw in him without the ugly jealousy nipping on the heels of that thought. It’s not his business why they dated, or who started it. It’s not his problem if Sasha says its not.

Nicke's problem is Fedya raising both eyebrows at him with the cigarette held jauntily between his gnarled first fingers on his right hand, not yet discarded.

“I’m about to get my ass handed to me aren’t I?”

“What?” Sergei says, gently bemused. “No declaration? No questions?”

“That was a question.”

“Ah,” he mutters, “how you say it? Rhetorical, I think.”

“How should I know.”

“Little Kolya,” Fedya says gently. “You love him?”

Nicke takes a minute before he answers, tongue tied at being asked so baldly. Does he love him? He does. Is that the main part? The part of Nicke that would do anything Sasha wanted unless it clashed with the part of both of them that refuses to back down from a challenge? Nicke thinks a better question is whether he knows him well enough to love him, whether he’s prepared to compromise for him, whether there’s a part of him that’s in doubt about what the risks are. “Yeah,” Nicke says, because fuck it.

“Okay.” Fedya flicks his cigarette over his shoulder without looking to see where it lands. He doesn’t even roll up his sleeves.

Nicke gets his ass handed to him.

Or at least, it seems that way, Nicke trying to remember what Carly and Wardo tried to teach him mostly in vain until he swings a wild punch that lands somewhere near the side of Fedya’s neck, and Fedya staggers sideways, grinning. His mouth isn’t even bloody. “Come on. One more.”

“Are you… letting me win?”

Fedya shrugs philosophically. “You will never know for certain,” he says. “But I say, maybe others, younger, meaner, maybe won’t be so easy. I’m slower, maybe you don’t ask questions you don’t want me to answer.”

Nicke squares up and punches him again.

Fedya coughs and holds up both hands, palms out. “Okay, Kolya. We’re finished.”

Nicke spits a mouthful of blood, feeling around the base of his teeth with his tongue. “Seriously?”

Fedorov shrugs, grabbing at the side of his neck with a theatrical grimace. “Fair and square. Fight is over when I say is done.”

“So I win?”

Fedorov laughs at him. “Good luck. I think you can be good enough, is fine by me.”

Nicke stands there for a second, knuckles smarting. “You think I’m gonna lose.”

“I think you’re gonna fight,” Fedorov tells him. “So for me is all I needed to know. Sasha can protect himself, I know this. I think you know this too.”

-

It feels as though a lifetime has passed when Nicke staggers back to the locker room, still bleeding sluggishly from the split in his lip.

It was no worse than anything he’s suffered on the ice, but the blood causes an immediate uproar from everyone except Sasha and Dima, who is sitting next to him, looking very smug. Sasha doesn’t rush over only because Marcus, Carly and Wardo are up and circling him right away, everyone else having to form concentric circles of concern around their backs.

Nicke catches Sasha’s eye in the scrum. Sasha grins at him, tonguing the place on his own lip where Nicke's is split.

Marcus is the first one whose question blasts through the uproar, and that’s only because it’s in Swedish and everything in Nicke's brain is white noise otherwise.

“I’m fine,” Nicke insists, batting away the concerned, reaching hands. “Why aren’t we talking about dinner?”

“Uh,” Greenie pipes up, ever articulate, “because you disappeared for fifteen minutes and came back all beat to hell?”

Nicke is still looking at Sasha. “I won, actually.”

Sasha’s smile softens. Everything in Nicke that holds him rigid softens with it, adrenaline leaving him slowly. He stuffs his shaking hands in the pocket of his hoodie and lifts his chin. “I’m hungry, boys. Gonna go get room service.”

Before anyone can ask him more questions he turns back to his stall to get dressed properly. He's just in time; one of the rink staff comes around to tell them their bus is ready and Nicke has to drag his sweaty, bloodied body back into his suit in time to catch it or catch hell from the coaches.

Usually he sits next to Greenie, but this time Sasha bodyslams Greenie gently out of the way and takes the aisle seat so Nicke can rest his head on the broad curve of his shoulder and fall into the exhausted doze of adrenaline crash.

-

“What do we tell people?” Nicke asks him, when they’re back in their room.

It’s Nicke and Greenie’s room, but again, Sasha’s star privilege — rarely exercised, usually respected— means Greenie only puts up a token resistance when Sasha shuts the door in his face.

(He opens it again a second later for Nicke to toss his stuff out the door at him and for Sasha to say “go room with Dima, he need to practice English, you right level,” before closing it over his indignant moan.)

“Greenie knows,” Nicke clarifies, when a thick silence descends between them, Sasha halfway out of his suit the way he always is as soon as they’re out of sight of any coaching staff. Nicke isn’t much better at keeping the stupid things on, but unlike Sasha he puts on a better show of respecting it. He yanks off his badly tied tie before Sasha is suddenly in his space, standing between his spread knees and batting his hands aside.

“You let me do it,” Sasha rumbles, “since you don’t listen to me, let Seryozha break your face.”

Sasha flicks a button on his shirt, knuckles brushing Nicke’s skin. “He let me win,” Nicke confesses. Maybe it should feel a certain way, but right then it’s just a statement of fact, everything in Nicke’s mind narrowing to the heat of Sasha’s hands, working their way down the buttons of his shirt. “I dunno why.”

Sasha shrugs philosophically, untucking Nicke’s shirt from his pants and then pausing, looking down at Nicke for so long he doesn’t know what to do, whether he’s supposed to ask for something else, whether Sasha will ever— oh, fuck— will ever let him tell him what to do. He’s not even sure he wants to, but he wants to find out.

Nicke’s jaw must have fallen open, because Sasha presses his thumb to the bruise on Nicke's mouth, pulling his lip to the side so Nicke can feel the air on the edge of his teeth, the cold splash of it setting a shiver through his whole body.

Nicke suddenly becomes aware that he’s so hard he can taste it in the back of his throat, just from Sasha touching him this way, like he deserves his attention.

It’s not as though Sasha has never touched him before; they touch all the time, on the road, at home, in bed, where Sema would smirk at him and say things in Russian that made Sasha boom out his real laugh, the one that takes over his whole body, makes him show all his teeth. Makes him a man who just shot the moon and can’t contain his joy. He’s seen every inch of him, had his big gold chains whack him in the face when he was trying to get a better angle on his cock, yelled at him in a rage when they’ve lost and he couldn’t hold it in anymore and had Sasha yell right back, just like Nicke hoped he would.

It’s never been without someone else in the background, never more than the peculiar friendship of two people who are together all the time but are dating different people, always on parallel roads never destined to intersect.

Nicke got comfortable there. Nicke dug himself a place in Sasha’s life knowing they could be great together on the ice and then discovering he and Sasha had something like a kindred spirit between them, two different extensions of the same drive.

Nicke has a whole life of which Sasha is only one part, but that part has been growing and growing. Sasha has a whole life of which Nicke is just one part, and he’s willing to let him be a bigger part of it.

That’s the feeling. That’s the headiness, the taste on his tongue, the blood in his mouth.

Nicke swallows, taking him by the wrist. “Not yet.”

Sasha sinks slowly to his knees. “You know,” he says, “when Sanya is fighting Seryozha he have to beat him fair and square.”

Nicke, dazed by love, has a hard time forcing himself to think about that. “Wait, who— who formed the league?”

Sasha shrugs, massive shoulders rolling back as his hand falls away and Nicke can take a breath again. “Zhenya and Fedya,” he says. “Is Zhenya’s idea.”

“That’s _so_ stupid,” Nicke breathes.

“You say that to Zhenya’s face?”

“I’m saying it to yours.”

Sasha leans in closer, bracing his elbows up on Nicke’s thighs, heavy weight of his arms grounding and torturous in equal measure. “Who else you tell?”

“Nobody yet,” Nicke says, wondering where to put his hands. “Let me fight him, then we can decide.”

Sasha solves his hands dilemma by undoing the button on Nicke’s suit pants, releasing the pressure against his belly. Nicke feels split open right along with his clothes, too big for his skin. “More?”

Nicke isn’t sure he’s ever felt this particular maelstrom before, longing and stubbornness and pride and affection for Sasha for torturing him, because Nicke asked him to do it. “No.”

-

They end up sharing the bed by the window when Nicke falls asleep to Sasha icing his face with a physical therapy pad he begged off one of the trainers.

Nicke wakes up sweaty and disoriented and with Sasha’s morning wood pressing against the back of his thighs, Sasha’s heavy arm over his waist and the sun lancing directly into his eyes.

If he jerked it quickly he might not even wake Sasha up, but Nicke just squints down at his dick and wills it to calm down.

It doesn’t work.

Sasha breathes a heavy sigh against the back of Nicke’s neck, close to waking but not quite there yet.

Nicke carefully slips a hand under his waistband and takes hold of himself, thumbing back the foreskin to spread a little bit of the wetness around, softer than he wants it, barely more than a tease, but he’s so sensitive that it only takes a few minutes for him to be almost to the edge, just, ah— almost.

Nicke preemptively waves goodbye to this particular pair of boxers just in time for him to discover Sasha is awake, arm across Nicke’s body gone rigid and his breathing the particular cadence of him trying to stay very still.

Nicke freezes.

“You gonna finish?” Sasha asks, not sounding sleepy in the least.

Nicke takes his hand off his dick with great reluctance. “Well, not _now_.”

Sasha pats his chest, a gentle, bracing slap of his bare palm, thumb catching in Nicke’s thin gold chain, the one he only wears because Sasha got it for him. “Next time you want _almost_ ,” Sasha says, “maybe I do it.”

Oh, fuck.

There must be a word for that. Nicke can’t think what it is in any language, but he almost bites through his own sore lip, trying not to agree too quickly. “Okay,” he rasps, sure he’s going to regret it. “You’re on.”

They lie there together for what feels like an entire geological age before Nicke thinks he’s soft enough to stand.

(He’s wrong, but he won’t give Sasha the satisfaction of hearing him moan.)

-

They don’t play Pittsburgh for what feels like half a fucking season.

In reality it’s more like a couple weeks, but Nicke, tense with anticipation, thinks he might grind his teeth right out of his jaw waiting for it to happen.

Nicke likes to think he can keep his cool when he needs to, likes to consider himself as having earned his reputation as a private person who prefers to let his hockey do the talking, as a good teammate who can read the room as well as the ice.

He’s not necessarily wrong about any of that, but the team notices.

“What crawled up your ass and died?” Greenie says, with his characteristic grace after a homestretch in which they lose two out of three and Nicke lets himself petulantly stare at a reporter he hopes might catch fire if he thinks about it hard enough.

“I have to fight Malkin, what do you think?” He pitches his voice low, even though Mike drove him to a bar instead of home like Nicke told him to and shoved a beer into his hand.

“I think you should tell the guys you’re taking on the Ovi challenge,” Mike points out. “It’s not exactly a secret.”

“It isn’t?” Nicke sips his beer to cover his surprise.

“Well, it’s like… an open secret. Like how Beags secretly loves beagles but can’t ever get one because the internet will explode. Like, people who know already...know.”

“That makes—”

“Yeah, yeah. Shut up and drink. I’m still talking.” Mike watches him intently to make sure Nicke is following his instructions. “Good. Also, when was the last time you got off?”

Nicke spits his beer back into the bottle and hates himself immediately. “Mike, what the fuck?”

“Oh come on. You think I can’t tell what’s going on when you start looking like one of those naked cats Dima has pictures of in his locker?”

“That is too specific for you to have thought it right now,” Nicke articulates carefully. “And… none of your business.”

“Be that way,” Mike says happily, tipping the bottom of Nicke’s beer up when he steals his. Nicke chokes a little, which sets Mike off ever more. Nicke briefly considers smashing a bottle and threatening him with it, then backs away from the thought with a vague horror.

“I just thought about stabbing you,” Nicke confesses, putting the bottle down.

Mike leans his elbow on the bar, taking on a very oversized version of an agony-aunt position, cheek on his fist and eyes wide open. “Goodness gracious. Sounds like all this strife and violence is detrimental to your mental health.”

“What?”

“Sports psychologist, dude. She’s amazing. Anyway, listen, do you need to get laid?”

Nicke thinks about it, challenging himself to rip the label off the beer bottle without having any intrusive murder thoughts. He gets all the way through one and breathes a sigh of relief. “You know what? I don’t.”

Mike looks at the shredded beer label with both his eyebrows halfway up his forehead. “Nicky, are you okay?”

“I will be,” Nicke decides. “One down, three to go.”

-

Sasha shows up at his house the night before their next road trip.

Nicke lets him in, desperate for the nearness of his body and the sound of his laugh, the shape of his hands tracing patterns on Nicke’s skin.

Sasha is a gifted man. Nicke knows this, has watched it in action, has marvelled at his immense physical intelligence for years, since long before they were teammates.

Nicke curses him to hell and back for it when Sasha turns it on him, learning all the ways Nicke’s body will respond to his with that terrifying focus he only reveals when people are looking out of the corners of their eyes, bringing him to the edge and leaving him there, filled to bursting.

Sasha’s mouth pulls off Nicke’s cock with a wet pop that must be intentional.

Sasha knows by now, with his undivided attention, how much of Nicke is also filled by the visual, the view as much a part of this as the sensation.

Nicke stares down at him, so hard it hurts, and absolutely refuses to scream.

Sasha slaps him in the thigh and stands up, tugging on a strand of Nicke’s hopelessly mussed hair, sharp little pain a calculated distraction.

“If we don’t play Pittsburgh soon I might die,” Nicke confesses, voice a strangled whisper in the back of his throat.

Sasha —warm and real, infuriatingly, punishingly real— stands there for a moment in the perfect whiteness of Nicke’s bedroom, one hand cupping himself, displaying the answering arousal Nicke wants to consume in some primal sense, take into his body. “Nobody ever die from this,” Sasha points out, before he starts to stroke up, a faint twisting motion evident as he speeds up that Nicke is desperate to replicate, and comes all over Nicke’s chest.

Nicke thinks if he touches even the sticky mess on his skin, just to feel it, he might undo himself. He can barely speak. “Remind me why I thought this was a good idea?”

Sasha drags his index finger down the middle of Nicke’s chest, cutting a path. He sticks his fingers in his mouth without any kind of warning or preamble, and smiles around them.

“I take it back,” Nicke croaks.

“Really?” Sasha asks, because he knows Nicke too fucking well.

Nicke shakes his head, completely out of words.

-

In hindsight, it was only ever going to go one way, but love and sex do strange things to people.

Maybe that’s what Mike’s sports psychologist might have said, if Nicke hadn’t shied away from that sentence like a spooked horse.

Anyway, they play Pittsburgh early in the season, all things considered, so, it’s not completely a disaster for the team when they get obliterated. It’s kind of a problem that it’s Nicke’s fault, but Malkin wouldn’t return his calls to arrange a time, so what else iwas Nicke supposed to do?

-

“You crazy son of a bitch, what are you _doing?_ ” Marcus whispers to him on the ice, when Nicke has dropped the play to circle around Malkin for the second time. There’s got to be an opening. “You’re going to get—”

“I know.”

“What’s wrong with you? Is this a bet? Are there bookies? Nicke are you in debt or something, you’re freaking me out.”

“I _know_ , Mackan.”

Someone is whistling frantically. There’s general uproar. Nicke can hear it. Nicke can see it. Nicke doesn’t care. His entire focus is the look Malkin is levelling at him from where he’s got his back to the boards, a calculating expression on his bizarre hangdog face.

Sidney Crosby is yelling something Nicke isn’t paying attention to.

Sasha looks like he wants to interfere, but Nicke just about manages to pull his chin to the side. _Now or never._

Nicke drops his gloves, hoping to at least get one or two shots in.

There’s an enormous, bemused roar from the crowd, and then—

Nicke gets a five minute penalty and two for instigation, and barely gets a chance to touch him before Malkin swats him away, making such a show of reluctance that Nicke looks like even more of a tool for it.

“Better luck next time,” Zhenya says, with absolutely no sympathy as he skates away from the box once his minutes are up in that lumbering way of his, surprisingly graceful for his proportions.

Nicke’s nose and jaw both smart, somehow.

It's nothing compared to his ego. So much for fighting lessons.

-

The less said about the apoplectic screaming Nicke is on the receiving end of during the first break the better. 

Mike claps him on the shoulder as they’re heading back out the tunnel, leaving his hand there for a little too long. “Is there… a better time for this? Like, not _now_?”

“Probably,” Nicke admits.

“So it can wait?”

Nicke shoves his mouthguard back in, grimacing at the lingering taste of blood he hasn’t been able to rinse out. “No.”

Mike looks like he wants to say something, but then they’re moving, on the ice before Mike can get a word in.

-

Nicke waits for his moment.

They’re going down hard. In a way, that’s better. As much as Nicke hates to lose —and he _hates_ it, a passionate loathing which keeps him sharp and mean he’d never change for the world— sometimes a loss has a silver lining.

Sure, later he might look back on this game tape and see every distracted error he made, and he’s going to catch hell for it no matter what, but it’s done now.

His mother would have a saying for it, probably. He should ask her. _Mama, what do you say when you’re blinded by lust and blood in your eyes?_

(She would probably tell him not to get so bloody in the first place.)

Halfway through the last period, they miraculously go on the penalty kill.

One of the coaches hisses at him, telling him to wake up. Nicke just stares at him and hops the boards. What does he know? Has he ever been in love? Has he ever had to fight for it? Nicke has run out of words for anyone but Zhenya, even when Sasha bumps his shoulder on his way over to the wing.

Sidney Crosby looks up at Nicke from his crouch over the dot. God, Nicke doesn’t even want to remember he exists. “Are you concussed?” Sidney Crosby whispers, lisping a little around his mouthguard. “Do you need medical attention?”

“Shut up,” Nicke offers neutrally, getting in position. “None of your business.”

Sidney Crosby frowns, raising his stick off the ice just a fraction of a centimetre, like he’s thinking of going for a slash instead of the puck. “Are you trying to get hurt?”

Nicke wants to yell at the linesman to just drop the damn puck already, but he just sighs and sinks deeper, settling into that space in his brain where everything slows down. “It’s for Sash— Ovi. Ask him.” Nicke jerks his chin at Malkin, just down the line. Just out of reach. 

Nicke likes to think he learns quickly, can analyse a mistake in form fast enough to correct it on a second pass. Nicke didn’t get good at hockey because he was the fastest or the biggest or had the hardest shot. It was because he learned the way nobody else seemed to, had a more agile mind for plays and variables than older, larger kids. It’s not like he’s never thrown a punch before, but he has made a point of not needing to.

For all that Carly and Wardo have tried to teach him, Nicke is already trying to think of better ways to do this when the puck goes down.

Sidney Crosby slashes him. Nicke drops his stick, gloves and inhibitions and takes Malkin straight to the boards. It’s pretty much the dumbest thing he could possibly have done, so he hopes it’s worth it for the element of surprise.

Malkin does him the courtesy of laughing in his face before he punches him flat.

-

Nicke hates the penalty box.

It’s like a fishbowl without the water, a plexiglass prison with a riot outside, people yelling at him from two sides while Malkin edges closer on his side of it, sliding toward the divider.

“You find teeth?” He gestures at his own untouched mouth. “Better you find them! Maybe you put back!”

Nicke gives him the finger, tonguing at the empty place where one of his upper lateral incisors used to be, counting backwards as the minutes tick down.

Play is carrying on without them. Across the rink Nicke can see the coaches conferring, wondering what the fuck is wrong with him. Fuck, another loose tooth, on the bottom this time, below the one that’s already gone.

Nicke looks at Malkin when he reaches in and twists it out. “Found it!”

Malkin grins at him, more just his lips peeled back than an actual smile. “You think I don’t make you work?”

“I think you are doing this for you, not Sasha,” Nicke half yells, adrenaline still heating him from the inside, sick wash of it keeping all the pain at bay.

Malkin eyes him strangely for a minute, and then his five are up and he’s skating away, leaving Nicke trapped alone for his extra two minutes.

“For what it’s worth,” the box official says to him out of the corner of his mouth, “I think Ovi got your other tooth for you.”

Nicke stares at him, trying to place his face. “I know you?”

“Oh, nah, I’m only here every time you play in Pittsburgh, it’s fine.” He looks at the clock. “Off you go. Don’t come back.”

Nicke feels compelled to lift a hand to him in parting.

-

After the game (which they lose) and the fights (which he lost) and the teeth (again, Nicke is 0 for 2) Nicke is just about drained.

That doesn’t stop Mike from calling a players-only meeting as soon as they’re back in the locker room, barricading the doors with a laundry bin and tossing his helmet off to the side without aiming.

The hollow _thock_ it makes when it hits the cinderblock wall is the only sound in the room for a second before Mike points at him and says: “Enough already. You gotta tell them.”

Nicke sighs, finding Sasha’s eyes as everyone starts yelling at once.

_”I knew something was up!”_

_”Is Nicky dying?!”_

_”You idiot, would he be fighting if he was sick?”_

Nicke listens to them squabble for a moment, letting it all be noise while he looks at Sasha.

Sasha who is across the room, Sasha who is smiling at him, whose teeth almost match his for a second, big kind eyes and a secret wicked streak to match Nicke’s own. There hasn’t been just one moment when Nicke realised he was in love with him. It was all of it, his skill and passion, his weird sense of humour, his hideous clothes, the way he’s always completely himself the way Nicke thinks is rarer than anyone gives him credit for.

Nicke raises his eyebrows. Sasha shrugs at him. _Your decision._

Fuck, Sasha is going to be an epic captain one day. “I’m fighting Sasha’s exes,” Nicke says, through his brand new mouthful of dental pain. “It's for love.”

Marcus and Beags are too busy trading theories to hear and everyone else is still arguing about the loss to pay attention. Nicke loves this stupid team, too.

Sasha rolls his eyes, sticks two fingers in his mouth and lets out a deafening whistle. Everyone pipes down, younger guys with better high-pitch hearing clapping hands over their ears. “Nicke,” Sasha says, with the perfect inflection he uses when he really feels like it. “Say it again.”

“It’s for love,” Nicke says, unable to raise his voice. “Do you have my other tooth?”

Sasha pulls it out of his gear, wrapped in a towel. “Ready to go?”

-

Nicke has been to the smattering of dentists who do NHL dental work on an emergency basis before. He’s been hit in the mouth plenty of times. Everyone has, it’s not exactly unusual.

He’s ready to pass out the second he lands in the chair, so actually it’s Sasha and the trainer who’s come with them answering questions. Nicke gives them a thumbs up when Sasha proffers his teeth and dozes off until a nice dental nurse wakes him up to stick some needles in him.

After that he wakes up in the hotel room standing at the foot of the bed without any solid idea how he got there. Dental sedatives. Hell of a drug.

He’s got a mouth and a head full of gauze so it only registers that Sasha has come back from the shower when he calls his name, beckoning him into the bathroom.

Nicke stares at the water beading on his chest for longer than he’s proud of before he goes.

Sasha taps his nose with a gentle finger again. “You awake in there?”

“Sort of,” Nicke mumbles. “Least I don’t wanna kiss you.”

“Don’t worry,” Sasha says. “Gonna get really good teeth.”

Nicke laughs, then regrets it immediately. “I dunno how to beat him,” he says, though it comes out far more garbled than he can bothered to correct.

“We think about it later, okay?” Sasha says, plucking at the hem of Nicke’s sweatshirt. “You want a shower?”

Nicke sort of wants to atomise himself and rematerialize a week from now, but failing that a shower would be nice. He lets Sasha help him undress and then doesn’t protest when Sasha gets back in with him, gently maneuvering him under the spray.

Sasha is mumbling something against the back of his shoulder, urging him to use the hotel’s expensive body wash. Nicke’s arms mostly do what he wants, but the idea of touching his own face right now is deeply unpleasant so the water pressure and the gentle heat will have to do.

“This good?” Sasha asks, picking up the shampoo.

Nicke thinks about it for a second, before he decides he’s already here and Sasha is already willing. “Sure.”

Nicke should have known it was a patented Sasha ambush; he always times the questions he most wants the answers to when there’s no possible chance of anyone else overhearing. In this case when Nicke is trapped between the mess in his mouth and the strange, pleasurable sensation of someone else washing his hair. “Nicke, you still want to do this? I can talk to them. I only agree because—”

“Someone broke your heart, and everyone loves you too much to see it happen more?” Nicke speaks pretty good English when he’s a little high, it turns out.

Sasha goes still against his back. “Yeah.”

“Good to know,” Nicke mutters. “Still gonna fight him again.”

Sasha snorts, cupping a hand over Nicke’s forehead so he doesn’t get shampoo in his eyes. “Maybe you wait until teeth are healed?”

Nicke closes his eyes again, drifting on the warmth. “My balls are gonna explode.”

Sasha whoops out a huge, unexpected laugh, spraying Nicke directly in the face.

Nicke is so hard he can feel it in his skull. Both of them ignore it.

-

When they’re back in Washington, Nicke gets ready for a serious dressing-down at practice.

He’s ready for it. He’s braced. He’s got his very best _taking your opinion on board_ face ready to go, the one he uses when coaches separate him and Sasha on the first line, or when reporters are making some dumb-ass observations from the sidelines.

Instead, Nicke gets a round of applause from every guy in the locker room, including the trainers. Mike is the one doing the idiotic slow clap after the actual noise has died down, but Nicke knows only one person could be behind this rapid shift in attitude.

He’s mouthing _what the fuck_ at Mike when coach Hunter steps out and clears his throat, crossing his arms in front of his burly chest. “Backy. Two majors, I outta bust you back to fourth line. But you stuck it out, showed some grit. We need that on this team. Just don’t give up fourteen minutes next time, yeah?”

“Okay,” Nicke says, because that seems safest. “Sure.”

Hunter grunts, like that’s the end of it. “See you all on the ice,” he says, before he’s gone, exiting the room like a battleship taking a hard turn to port.

There’s a moment of silence when everyone watches to make sure he’s not coming back, and then a quick series of whoops as Mike gathers everyone into a huddle around Nicke’s stall. Sasha has managed to move their names so they’re next to each other, and Nicke will never know who he bribed to do that but he’s grateful for it in a primal, physical sense, buoyed by Sasha’s warmth at his shoulder.

“You absolute madman,” Mike says happily, “I have never seen anything that stupid in my whole life. It was like watching a chicken trying to fight a T-Rex. I’m so proud of you.”

“You’re fucking terrible,” Nicke tells him, meaning it with all the affection in his heart.

Sasha butts in, tapping Mike in the chest with his big knuckles. “No more majors,” he says. “We arrange properly. You teach him to block, is more important.”

“He’s right,” Mike says, nodding sagely despite his general lack of gravitas. “Team effort, Backy. We’ve got you.”

Nicke’s teeth still smart and he's so sexually frustrated he’s been having increasingly bizarre dreams about walking into blank rooms where a dozen identical clones of himself are jerking off in rhythm. He’s never been happier to play a team sport.

-

More often than not, Nicke would probably have crashed at Mike’s if he was at a loose end in DC, or gone to check on how some of the rookies are settling in.

Nicke used to sometimes go over to Sasha and Sema’s on a whim, and sometimes Mike would join in, though he confessed that sometimes it was “too much dick all at once” for him, which made the rest of them laugh until Nicke choked on his beer.

Nicke doesn’t trust himself not to undo his stupid self-inflicted pact not to get his rocks off if he goes over to Sasha’s, but he doubly doesn’t trust himself to keep his hands above the waist if he goes home alone.

“Hey,” he says to Marcus after practice. “You wanna come over? Play games at mine or something?”

Marcus stares at him in what looks like fear. “Yeah, no, not to be weird but…I’m kind of worried that if I hang out with you right now whatever person you have to fight next is going to show up in your yard with a boom box and a boxing ring and it’ll be on HBO in the morning. I don’t want to be on TV watching you get killed.”

Nicke is still deciding whether to be offended when Marcus backs slowly away, replaced almost immediately by Sasha, looming into view by his car, an enormous, flashy hulk that Nicke has always secretly wanted to drive.

“Mojo not want you to hump him in your sleep?” Sasha nods sagely, trying his best to keep a straight face. “Smart. Swedish logic, very clear.”

“Shut up,” Nicke says, grinning helplessly. “God, shut _up._ ”

“Careful, or your teeth fall out,” Sasha says. “Come home with me?”

Nicke knows better. His entire body is preemptively throbbing. “Yeah, okay.”

-

Nicke goes home with Sasha. Nicke ices his face on Sasha’s couch while Sasha plays FIFA in his underwear, theatrically throwing himself down on the game room carpet when he misses a goal and then staying there, his shaggy mane of dark hair just in reach of the tips of Nicke’s fingers.

Nicke plunges a hand into it before he can think himself out of the impulse, drinking his beer as casually as possible through his straw when Sasha glances up at him. “That feel really nice,” Sasha says hoarsely, when Nicke doesn’t stop.

Time passes very slowly when you’re aware of every molecule of space between your bodies, Nicke discovers.

He tries to think about anything but the curve of Sasha’s skull, the warmth of his skin, the rasp in his voice when Nicke started to touch him.

The opulent emptiness of Sasha’s house has always astounded him, Sasha’s presence concentrated into a few rooms with the rest left empty as a testament to wealth. It’s one of the things about Sasha that baffle him, how he can live with caverns in his home, how he can have so much and use so little. He lives in excess, but cocoons himself into rooms like these, cluttered with sentimental objects. He has freezers full of food his mother cooks he parcels out carefully until the month she comes back, always ending up with leftovers, as though he can’t stand the possibility of not having any over the joy of eating it all. He loves hugely. Nicke’s other hand, relieved of his finished beer, is creeping towards his waistband again.

Nicke forces out a breath and stops touching Sasha. “I need you to do something for me,” he says, impressed by how smooth his voice comes out, considering it feels as though his body might be eating itself from the inside.

“Anything,” Sasha says, eyes huge and dark.

-

Sasha doesn’t have any handcuffs, which Nicke finds vaguely surprising, but he does have an abundance of bathrobes, each of them with a matching tie.

“You choose,” Nicke mutters thickly, a feeling in the pit of his stomach like a cramp, a short, tense spasm of pure want.

Sasha picks a red one, obviously.

Nicke almost bites through his lip when Sasha has finished tying his knot with a flourish, a big, silly bow gently clamping his wrists together, soft cloth feeling just as bad as rough rope might.

“Thank you,” Nicke says, gratified that if he’s suffering, at least Sasha is too, an obvious bulge in his sweatpants showing no signs of going anywhere as they settle back to the couch in the game room, surrounded by Sasha’s least delicate mementoes.

As soon as they’re laying down —Nicke awkwardly, not sure what to do with his elbows, Sasha sprawled with his bare feet too near Nicke’s lap, even though the sectional is enormous— Sasha palms himself through the fabric, apparently intent on watching Nicke suffer his self-inflicted conditions. “If you’re at home right now, what you’re doing?” Sasha asks, voice a little deeper into the back of his throat than usual.

Nicke feels as though someone has taken a cattle prod to the back of his head, so blinding is the urge to ask Sasha for relief. “Nothing. Sleeping.”

“Not this?” Sasha slips a hand into his sweatpants, wrist disappearing, his eyes slipping halfway closed. “You don’t come here to make sure you can’t? Want me to do what you say, make sure you can’t?”

Nicke is about to rip the knot open with his aching teeth when a sound penetrates his haze that sounds too much like a doorbell to be a hallucination.

Sasha curses in Russian so profoundly Nicke even manages to catch a few words before he’s carefully levering himself off the couch and trying to adjust his boner so it’s not quite so obvious.

“Can’t we just…tell whoever it is to fuck off?” Nicke says, feeling short of breath.

“I know who,” Sasha says, a note of resignation in his voice. “She is still have code for the gate but Sema make me change locks.” He takes Nicke gently by the elbow, guiding him to his feet. “Come on, she here for you.”

-

Maria Kirilenko isn’t nearly as tall as either of them, but she somehow seems gigantic, standing on Sasha’s front step in neat athletic gear with an immaculate blonde braid and an incredibly unimpressed look on her face.

She looks at Nicke, taking in the general state of bruised disarray and evidently deciding not to comment on the bathrobe tie before she launches into a sentence in Russian that makes Sasha glare down at her.

“Well?” She says, switching to English. “You don’t invite me in?”

“No,” Sasha declares. “We talk in the garden.”

“You are still angry I tell you your house is like dollhouse for boys?”

Sasha says something back that sounds terse, but his shoulders come down from their defensive hunch as he leads them around the house to the patio, a lovely cool breeze skimming under Nicke’s decidedly overheated collar.

Nicke can’t think of a good time to ask Sasha to untie him, some part of him vaguely hoping nobody will comment on it, but when he tries to catch Sasha’s eye Maria interjects, kicking her feet up on the wicker patio table.

“Oh, no, don’t let me stop this.” She glances at Nicke’s hands and he can feel himself redden furiously, right up to the tips of his ears. “He is being nice?”

Nicke swallows. “That’s not your— I can’t—” He takes a deep breath, watching Sasha hover a little bit, trying to decide how close to sit. “I can’t fight you right now,” Nicke declares, mentally kicking himself for the delay.

Maria laughs at him. “Oh no, I won’t fight you. I have matches. You are already—” she gestures at his face. “You already get beat.”

“So why are you here?”

Maria raises one perfect eyebrow, tossing her braid over her broad, tanned shoulder. She looks like she could snap Nicke in half. “When I fight Zhenya I kick him in the balls and run,” she says casually, pointing one manicured finger right at Nicke’s chest like a dagger. “No dishonour in love.”

Sasha asks her something in Russian that makes her laugh again, a quieter, friendlier sound than Nicke was expecting, now that his anxiety is out of the way. He’s not sure he could have beaten her, either, and the image of her getting Malkin where it hurts is enough to make him like her just a little more.

He’d like her fine if Sasha didn’t still look a little bit angry and a little bit young, faced with her right here on the porch.

She turns to him and replies, a conversation that Nicke can’t follow zipping past him. He’ll have to learn some Russian. How come he’s never learned any Russian.

“Sasha,” Maria says, “tell him, please.”

Sasha edges closer, laying his arm carefully over Nicke’s shoulders. “Maria say that she fight Fedya fair and square, but that—”

“This league is stupid,” Maria supplies.

“That she heard from Fedya you maybe try to find her so she come here to make sure we know she is not—”

“—Getting involved,” Maria finishes.

Sasha grits his teeth. “Yes.”

She smiles at him, and that too seems less sharp-edged than Nicke had thought, when she first arrived. “Sasha. You know how I am.”

Sasha sighs, an exhale Nicke feels all down his side. “Yes.”

She says something to him in Russian again, and then she stands up to dust off the back of her thighs, gesturing at Sasha’s outdoor furniture, bare without its summer cushions, which makes Sasha huff something indignant, standing to match her. She looks at Nicke, lifting her chin so she seems even taller from where he’s sitting. “He is good, at the heart,” she says. “I won’t fight you for him.”

Sasha walks her back around the front of the house before Nicke can answer, jumping forward to show her out.

Nicke sits there in the cold for a moment, trying to figure out what just happened.

He’s never seen Sasha uncertain like that, not even when Sema had to leave, or when Sema was really injured and he and Mike came over to make sure they had everything set up okay for him to do PT at home.

The league suddenly seems a little less stupid when Sasha has evidently still suffered a little bit of heartbreak.

Sasha comes back for him after Nicke hears a car pulling out of the driveway, bare feet padding around the house on the flagstones.

“Please untie me,” Nicke says, when Sasha comes to a standing stop next to him, looking down with opaque confusion all over his face.

Sasha makes a sound that Nicke thinks is very close to relief when he sinks to his knees to do it, hands occupied with freeing Nicke’s and then staying there, holding them together between his broad, rough palms.

“Are you okay?” Nicke asks him thickly.

Sasha presses a kiss to Nicke’s parallel thumbs, lips hot against cold skin. “Yes. Better than okay.”

“What did she say?”

“She say…” Sasha pauses, seeming not to notice or care how cold it is, or that he’s kneeling on stone. “She say she’s happy I find someone exactly right kind of person for me.”

“She doesn’t know me,” Nicke points out.

“She saw you fight Zhenya on TV,” Sasha says, starting to smile again, just a little hint of it. Nicke is so relieved he doesn’t know what to do. “So she have some ideas.”

Nicke thwacks him in the arm, grinning helplessly, heedless of the pain in his face.

At least the upside of the cold is that Nicke’s boner has disappeared.

-

They’ve got a few weeks before they’re on the road to Carolina, which is good because it gives Nicke’s teeth a while to settle before he risks knocking them out again.

In the meantime, something about his self-inflicted abstinence seems to seep into his hockey, making him scrappier and faster, giving him a sharper edge.

It doesn’t seem to help much when he comes in early for Carly and Wardo (and whoever else is around and feels like watching him make a fool of himself) to give him pointers in the gym when they set him up on the punching bag in the corner, showing him how to tape up his hands and encouraging him to go to town on it.

It doesn’t really help, because something in Nicke’s hindbrain refuses to make the connection between the featureless faux-leather of the bag and the reality of a human face. The bag, after all, doesn’t punch back, and nobody on the team seems willing to actually stand in.

“No offense,” Carly says quietly, after Nicke has started ripping the tape off his knuckles, quietly thankful he has no hair there for it to take with it, “but this doesn’t seem like something you actually want to do.”

“I don’t,” Nicke tells him. “I just have to.”

“Don’t you like...wrestle with Marcus? What about that?”

“That’s for fun,” Nicke explains. “He likes it.”

“Does he?”

Nicke thinks of Marcus yelling between his thighs. “Yes.”

“Too bad you can’t wrestle Malkin,” Carly says, smacking him in the shoulder. “Ice your hands.”

Nicke does, and then gets ready for practice.

The coaches seem happy with him. Nicke himself can’t decide what he is, whether he’s elated to have a few wins under the belt or whether he’s done something so massively, cataclysmically stupid that his dick will never forgive him, because Sasha is just there.

He’s just _there_ all the time; his stall has migrated next to Nicke’s. They room together on the road, though sometimes they split the time with Mike and Dima.

This poses a problem because Mike knows Nicke’s jerk-off habits intimately.

They start the roadie Nicke has been waiting for in Florida, playing the Panthers and the Bolts back to back before finally moving up the coast towards Carolina.

On the plane down to Miami Sasha falls asleep on his shoulder, sitting next to him by unspoken agreement because Nicke plans to room with Mike for this one. He’s hard instantaneously, just because he’s touching him.

Sasha is abominably heavy. Nicke loves it, the thick, undeniable presence of him, the way he takes up whole rooms.

Nicke wishes he had better words for the kind of longing he’s developed for his touch.

Mike smirks at him when they get to their room and Nicke flops facedown on the bed, groaning miserably when he shifts his hips.

“I knew it,” Mike says happily, sitting cross-legged on his bed like a suited gargoyle, watching Nicke suffer. “I knew you two had some weird kinky shit going on. Tell me. Can you only get off if he touches you? Are you like, not allowed to fuck until you can date for real?” Mike gasps theatrically. “Nicky are you saving yourself so you can _make love_?”

Nicke wonders how it can be possible that all hotel sheets smell the same, that slightly astringent cleanness of disinfected fabric and softener. He’s wondering this because his face is still buried in the duvet while Mike is concocting increasingly elaborate theories for Nicke’s self-inflicted torture, and he doesn't want to tell him the truth.

“—oh my god you’re doing the tantric thing, aren't you, this is too good—”

“I told him to do it to me,” Nicke mumbles, turning his head so he has one eye on Mike, his hair coming loose from its gel and falling over his forehead. “It was my idea.”

“Jesus,” Mike says, delight all over his face. “Why?”

Nicke hates that he still blushes, that he didn’t grow out of it after his teens, that he can feel it crawling up his neck and setting his ears and cheeks on fire. “Motivation.”

“That’s so _dumb_ ,” Mike says admiringly.

“Don’t let me jerk off, okay?”

“Why don’t you just get one of those, you know—” Mike makes a gesture like he’s turning a key. “Things?”

Nicke’s entire body spasms. “It’s just two games until Sema, just— throw a pillow at me or something.”

“Or you could—hear me out— fuck him?”

Nicke pushes himself onto his side so he can look at Mike with both eyes. Mike has seen his boner hundreds of times, he can cope. “What if I never beat them? I want it to be…”

Mike nods encouragingly, grabbing a spare pillow off his bed and holding it up, ready to throw. “Go on, let it out.”

“I want it to be real,” Nicke whispers. “Not like all the times we did it because it was casual. I don’t want it to be easy.”

“You are twisted, you know that right?”

“Shut up, Mike.”

“Don’t worry,” Mike says, “I’ve got your back.” He whacks the pillow down on Nicke’s thigh for emphasis. “So, Sema fights like a wet cat, you wanna make a plan for Geno?”

“Gotta get through Sema first,” Nicke says, happy to have Mike onside at least. Even if Nicke has to wait all season, at least someone knows why besides him and Sasha. It doesn’t make it less annoying later that night when Mike hits him in the face with a pillow at two in the morning.

-

They get to Carolina on a Wednesday.

Nicke once met someone on a date who professed to dislike Wednesdays and Nicke has never been able to stop thinking about it; it seemed like such an arbitrary thing to dislike, a regular day of the week, but then again Nicke has the luxury of playing a game he loves for a living, all dangers of concussion and general serious injury aside. He’s never had to live a regular life and isn’t sure he’d even be able to.

He’s mulling on the concept of Wednesdays when Greenie chivvies him out of bed for the shower. Nicke so far hasn’t regressed past bizarre sex dreams to actual wet ones, but he thinks that might be next.

Nicke has been on a points streak though, so the coaches are still pleased, but he keeps getting knowing looks from the team, and every so often one of them will mime a punch like they’re cheering him on.

Nicke seeks out Carly after morning skate, edging closer to him in the corner of the rink. “Got pointers?” He asks, without much hope.

“I have one piece of advice for you,” Carly drawls, tapping Nicke in the pads with the butt of his stick, “don’t mouth off.”

 _Mouth off?_ Nicke is competitive. Strategic, even. Occasionally heated, but he doesn’t speak fast enough to mouth off. “I never mouth off,” Nicke protests, but he only gets half the sentence out before Carly starts cackling, waving Mike and Wardo over, eyes starting to water. “Backy, say it again.”

“No,” Nicke says primly, made aware of his newest lack in self awareness just in time for Sasha to join the scrum, slinging his arm over Nicke’s shoulders, making his pads press into the side of his neck in that familiar way that comes from this particular weight.

“What we’re laughing about?” Sasha asks, before the other three double over again, only Mike able to relay the message.

“Nicky thinks he doesn’t mouth off.”

“I—”

Sasha shakes him gently. “I like it,” he says matter-of-factly. “Pointy face get pointier, he always right, everyone so mad they play like shit.”

Nicke wants to protest, but their time on the ice is up, their last five minutes to goof around expired in laughter.

Nicke tries to muster some annoyance but can’t. He’s too preoccupied and Sasha is too near, too real and sweaty and ready to play, so Nicke has to let it go, irritation sliding through his fingers like grit. “You’re buying me lunch,” Nicke says out of the corner of his mouth when they’re back in the locker room, yanking off his jersey too hard and getting all his hair in his face.

“Was going to anyway,” Sasha says blithely, already down to pads. “Hurry up.”

Nicke could make anything a race, as a kid. He was always first to the front door from the car, first out of bed and down to breakfast, first out the door with skates on. It used to drive his brother crazy. Nicke learned patience later and harder, but he did learn it. He doesn’t think he can explain how much it’s costing him to wait to take Sasha somewhere and just kiss him until he’s gasping.

Their plans for lunch in the sun somewhere are derailed as neatly as they were formed though, because Sema is standing outside their locker room in a t-shirt with the collar worn out, all his gold obvious on his chest, russet colouring only made more obvious by the Carolina climate.

He still looks like his face was set in a smirk by a hard wind, thin lips curled over to the side, everything else about him so perfectly symmetrical he’s almost hard to look at. Nicke can feel himself settle into the place of calm he only knows from the moment before play starts, the eternity as the puck falls from above just before it hits the ice.

Sema lifts his chin at Sasha and says something in Russian. Nicke makes a pact with himself to take a lesson or two. This is getting ridiculous.

Sasha, his arm still very much over Nicke’s shoulders, even now they’re out of pads, tenses. “No,” Sasha says softly. “Not now.”

Sema rolls his eyes, otherwise not moving a muscle before he unlocks his joints to actually look at Nicke. “Punch me,” he says, mouth always a little careful around English vowels. “Now.”

Nicke has so many questions. He doesn’t ask any of them. He just ducks out from under Sasha before he can stop him and punches Sema in the jaw, a respectable if utilitarian uppercut that snaps his teeth closed, blood seeping out a second later when Sema staggers back, grimaces, and returns the favour before Nicke can even think to try and fend him off.

“Fuck,” Nicke manages, feeling around his cheekbone to make sure it’s intact.

Sema spits on the cement hallway floor, shaking out his hand. “Good,” he says. “You win.”

“What?”

Sasha plants himself between them, turns to Sema, and yells at him for what Nicke thinks is quite a long time, but that might only be because his knuckles and face have begun to throb in time with each other.

It’s probably a blessing in disguise that he doesn’t speak any Russian worth writing home about, because he doesn't think he could handle this, the two of them with their heads together, the same height with vastly different shapes, a painfully similar posture when neither of them is aware they’re being watched.

Nicke has an abrupt flashback to his first time between them, when he was only nineteen and they weren’t much older, though the gulf between nineteen and Sema’s twenty-two had seemed vast at the time. “Hey,” Nicke croaks hoarsely, “what the fuck?”

Sema says something in Russian, waving vaguely at Sasha, evidently not planning on speaking English for Nicke’s benefit, another thing he remembers with intimate clarity.

Sasha asks him something that Nicke is sure isn’t flattering, though his hand has settled on Sema’s upper arm, squeezing gently. Nicke wants to hear Sasha say he doesn’t want him anymore, but the better part of him known he’d never ask him to lie.

“He want to make a plan,” Sasha says carefully. “For tonight.” Sema swipes at the blood still seeping from his lip with the back of one large hand, leaving messy streaks across the back of his knuckles. “He says you make Zhenya scared, he sees you learn to fight.”

Nicke swallows hard. He knew this would never be simple, this thing with Sasha. He knew there would always be a depth of field he has no access to. Nicke has plenty he could say to this plan, but in the end he sidesteps it, blood rushing around his body on the adrenaline wash, sense-memory of Sema’s body on his driving him sideways. “Come have lunch with us,” he tells him. Sema understands him fine. “See if you can chew.”

Sema laughs at him, lips peeled back from his pinked teeth. “Food here is terrible.”

Sasha puts that proprietary hand over the back of Sema’s neck the way he used to. “You show us the good place?”

Sema shoves him off and sets off down the hall without a word.

-

Lunch is weird.

That’s the only way Nicke can think of to describe it. It’s weird.

Sema and Sasha chat in quickfire Russian, kicking each other under the table, except when Sasha leans over to translate and Nicke smiles around his fork, barely following because he’s watching them so intently.

Sasha was a wreck when the trade happened. Nicke knows. Nicke was there for the pre-season when they were all getting back on the ice and Sema wasn’t, traded down south without a second word.

Nicke was there for all of it, and Nicke missed him too.

They look like friends.

“Why didn’t you try?” Nicke asks quietly, squeezed besides Sasha in an oversized booth in a nearly empty diner Sema seems to like because nobody spends much time at their table, even the staff. “It’s not so far.”

Sasha pauses, going still and quiet next to him, something about the set of his shoulders shrinking as Nicke watches. Maybe nobody else would notice, but Sema seems to. He starts to say something in Russian, then stops himself, gritting his teeth. “You want…something far?”

“I end it,” Sasha says quietly. “I end it for me. We’re always friends.” He sighs, pushing his plate away, nudging it towards Sema with two gentle fingers. “It’s better, being friends, not always trying to make time when there is no time.”

Nicke understands. Of course he does. He didn’t arrive in Washington without a touch or two in his wake, but it’s different, now. It’s different when he wants them both to stop hurting over it and knows he can’t do that. He might have been furious at Sema for so many things over the years he was in Washington, but none of that really matters compared to what he means to Sasha. It’s all stuff to leave on the ice. “I’m gonna go take a nap,” Nicke says quietly. “See you later.”

-

Sasha slips into bed with him an hour later, waking him up with his knees.

“You okay?”

Sasha breathes into the back of his neck for a minute, warm and steady. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

-

It doesn’t happen until the third period, when it already seems like they have it in the bag and Carolina is down by two.

Nicke has been trying to get past Sema the whole game, and Sema is toying with him like a cat, swiping and then ducking away. He’s not scoring that many goals, but he’s not doing anything particularly worth getting blown on.

Nicke remembers abruptly why he finds him infuriating.

Finally, Sema takes him to the boards, trying to get the puck back. It’s a textbook play. Completely legal. “Okay,” Sema says. “Now. You make Zhenya pay attention.”

Nicke elbows him, low and dirty. “Really?”

“I gonna punch you.”

Nicke just about has enough time to duck.

For a mostly-fake fight it feels pretty real, but Nicke doesn’t get the instigating penalty. That sort of makes up for the black eye, and the way Sema looks at him when Nicke tries to choke him, like he knows Nicke has always secretly kind of wanted to, in a different context.

It’s complicated.

It’s really hard, it turns out, to skate when you’re turned on.

Nicke accepts his round of applause from the bench with his cheeks bright red, flush prickling under his collar.

Sasha grins at him, scooping his helmet off to bury him in a crushing hug.

-

They’ve been back in town for three days when Nicke comes off the ice after a practice on an off day to two missed calls from an unknown number.

Nicke takes it to Sasha first, which is easy enough, seeing as Nicke has utterly given up the pretence of not staying over at his until this whole thing is put to bed (literally and metaphorically) and they can have an actual conversation about it. “Do you know who this is?”

Sasha takes his phone and flips it open. “No, they leave message?”

“No.”

Sasha shrugs. “Call back.” Nicke decides he needs something to eat first, raiding the fridge while Sasha scrolls through Nicke’s missed calls. “You don’t call your mom? Call your mom.”

“Did I ask?”

Sasha chuckles at him, snapping the phone closed. “You’re grumpy. Too horny?”

Nicke freezes with half a carrot in his mouth, shutting the fridge with his elbow. Weirdly, Nicke has sort of settled into celibacy, or at least the lack of climax. It feels almost like he’s been wearing some kind of weight for so long that he’s stopped noticing it. Except for how Sasha is still wet from the shower and his hair is starting to flop onto his forehead and his eyes are laughing at Nicke right along with the rest of him.

Nicke swallows his mouthful of carrot. “Call it back.”

“Oh no, no you do it.”

Nicke glares at him. “Call.”

Sasha flips the phone back open.

Nicke watches him listen to it ringing, carefully arranging the food he’s removed purely by impulse in size order.

“Sidney Crosby?” Sasha says, looking at Nicke. “How you’re getting this number?”

Nicke lunges for it, shoving the cucumbers and tomatoes out of alignment, scrambling to right the phone when he fumbles it. “Hello?”

Sidney Crosby makes a weird sound in his ear. “Ovi’s keeping your phone now?”

“No.” Nicke has never been praised for his phone skills.

Sidney Crosby clears his throat. “Okay. Look, Geno has been a real bear about this. He finally told me what’s going on, and I just want to say—”

“None of your business,” Nicke says, as calmly as he can manage. “It is between—”

“It’s getting in the way of hockey,” Sidney Crosby says. “Fighting is stupid.”

Nicke technically agrees, but this seems pretty uncalled for under the circumstances. “What’s your point?”

“Take care of it off the ice,” Sidney Crosby says, as though Nicke is taking up too much of his incredibly valuable time already. “Geno is free for lunch on our next road trip. When we’ll be in Washington.”

“Are you… arranging a date?”

Sidney Crosby says nothing for a little bit too long. “If that’s what you want to call it.”

“A fight date?”

“Sure,” he says tightly. “Whatever.” He pauses for long enough for Nicke to wonder if he should hang up, even if neither of them has formally concluded the call. Sidney Crosby clears his throat. “Are your teeth okay?”

“Yeah,” Nicke mutters.

“Okay good.” Sidney Crosby hangs up.

Nicke snaps his phone closed and tosses it next to the sliced turkey on the counter. “I think….I’m fighting Geno next week. Off the ice.”

Sasha bursts out laughing the second Nicke realizes that in his haste to grab the phone he’s squished a tomato all over his shirt.

-

The week passes in a haze; looking back on it, Nicke can barely remember what happened between getting the phone call and Zhenya Malkin showing up on his front lawn in a yellow puffer vest looking both bored and furious, a beanie slipping sideways off his giant head.

Well, that’s not strictly true: Nicke remembers things like discovering he’s begun to have wet dreams again, waking up itchy with heat and suspiciously damp, any pleasure left behind in his sleep.

Nicke remembers winning some games, something explosive about his physicality taking over on the ice.

Nicke remembers spending the morning at Sasha’s the way he has so often of late, asking him to hold him down for a bit, just keep his wrists flat to the mattress for a while until the swarm of bees beneath his skin calms down.

The morning Zhenya Malkin shows up isn’t one of them.

After the wet dream, Nicke decided to sleep at his own house, in his own bed, as though that would make any difference.

“Is today?” Sasha had asked, pulling Nicke close for a second before he stepped reluctantly out the door, nose buried in the bit of hair escaping out from under Nicke’s hat. “You want me there?”

Nicke had wanted desperately to say yes, but something about the pre-arranged nature of it felt personal like Nicke had to square up himself. Third time lucky.

At least he’s grown so accustomed to ignoring his own arousal that it seems almost logical Malkin would show up when Nicke is coming off a nap and therefore hard as a rock.

“That for me?” Zhenya asks, with no particular inflection to his voice.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Nicke says, not bothering to hide it.

Nicke stares at him. Malkin stares back, fists buried deep in the pockets of his vest. It seems, somehow, impossible to start. On the ice it’s so easy. There are rules there, penalties and time limits and— fuck, everyone else he’s fought hasn’t actually _wanted_ to prevent him from dating Sasha. Malkin is the only one who seems like he might have some reason not to let it go. Some reason to play this out. Nicke isn’t a fighter. He never has been. Neither are any of them, really. Even Malkin, who mostly just wins by reach alone. “Why don’t you want me to date Sasha?”

Malkin unzips his vest. “We have game later.”

Nicke sighs. “I guess I’ll beat it out of you.”

Nicke steps off the front porch barefoot, then realizes it’s actually gotten too cold to do that. “Can you give me a minute?”

Malkin’s nose has gone red, but Nicke can’t tell if that’s fury or the breeze. “Sure.”

“Come in,” Nicke says reluctantly, turning back to grab some sneakers or something. Once they’re both inside it seems even more ridiculous. Nicke can’t be said to be houseproud, exactly, but he does kind of like how it’s decorated and he doesn’t really want to mess it up. Nicke thinks about offering him a drink and decides against it. Take that.

Malkin watches him find shoes with decent tread from his hall closet without comment, seemingly content to wait.

Nicke pulls them on, ambivalence fading as he considers his options. Either he has a real shot now or he doesn’t, and there’s only one way to be sure. “Back garden,” Nicke says neutrally. “Follow me.”

“You very slow,” Malkin says, when Nicke is busy unlocking his French doors. “You fight better on ice? Is good for me. Not you.”

“Right.” Nicke drops the keys. “Sure.”

Nicke punches him in the nose.

Zhenya reels back, hand up to stem the flood of blood dripping down his chin, hangdog eyes gone from bored to furious in an instant. Nicke regrets not actually opening the doors when Zhenya bowls him right through them a second later, landing on top of him hard enough to almost drive the air right out of his chest, a tinkling rain of glass shattering all around them, a faint sting of something sharp hitting his forehead where Zhenya isn’t covering him.

Nicke doesn’t have time to check for cuts before Zhenya is trying to get enough leverage to put him in a chokehold.

For a second, Nicke can see exactly how this will play out: he’s going to get choked nearly unconscious on his own back patio, and Zhenya Malkin is going to walk out the front door with only a little bit of injury, and Nicke will have no _answers._

Nicke grabs at him, trying to get enough air to think, a difficult task when Zhenya has arms the length of a boa constrictor somehow. God, maybe Nicke could just kick him in the balls, but there’s too much weight on his legs.

No. It’s not going down like this. Someone once told him the definition of madness was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, but Nicke thinks that isn’t strictly true; after all, he does the same thing almost every night, just in different combinations, different iterations of the same movements, holding the puck slightly less or more before he passes, looking for patterns in the carefully balanced chaos of a game. Playing the variables, not a different game.

 _Think._ Little silver dots are creeping in around the edges of his vision. If this were on the ice, he’d know every centimetre of it, every groove and bump and slight warp of the boards.

Nicke hasn’t lost a wrestling match yet. Nicke gets a knee free from under Zhenya’s surprising weight and jabs him as hard as he can in the side, once and then again. It doesn’t do much, but Nicke isn’t expecting it to. It just distracts for long enough that Nicke can grab a loose handful of glass and ornamental plant gravel out of the low boxes lining the edge of the porch and throw it vaguely at his face.

Half of it rains down on Nicke himself, but Zhenya curses and loosens his grip, just enough.

Nicke rolls over, shoves him off and runs for it, chest aching but lungs blessedly full of air.

This is his yard. Sure he doesn’t give a fuck about where the flowerbeds are, but now that someone’s put them in he knows where everything is meant to be, even down to the little putting green over beside the pond which gets slippery when it’s wet.

For a second he thinks it might not work, but then, as if in slow motion Zhenya chases him. It’s not dignified. It’s winter, so everything is damp and muddy, their feet leaving streaks on the lawn. Nicke leads him unsteadily down the hill, throat throbbing as his pulse speeds up. He tries to get him to slip and go down by the gazebo, but no luck, so Nicke takes his shot at his last resort.

He ends up veering a sharp left at the bottom of the garden and hitting the slope down to the water features heels-first. Zhenya isn’t so balanced, leaping over the slight hump and realizing the angle is sharper than it looks and losing his footing, going skidding towards the water not entirely unlike a dropped marionette.

Nicke doesn’t give himself time to think when Zhenya unceremoniously slides into the cold, slimy water with an indignant roar, throwing himself on top of him.

Zhenya looks genuinely surprised for a second before Nicke shoves him under, managing to keep him there until Zhenya slaps the side of his head with an open palm, knocking him aside enough to surface.

Nicke is out of breath and freezing cold, but it’s nothing to Zhenya, who hacks out a huge mouthful of greenish pond water and starts to curse between gasps for breath. Nicke leaps on him again. If he’s going to beat him it’ll be now. Nicke doesn’t think he’ll get another shot.

It’s only when Zhenya’s incensed gargling starts to sound truly distressed that Nicke begins to feel he ought to let him go.

Nicke releases him, watching him shoot to the surface and stand there gasping, ankle deep in sludge on the bottom with the water swirling brown and clouded around his waist.

Nicke is ready to take him down again if he has to.

“Fuck,” Zhenya enunciates, between fits of chattering teeth.

“I’ll do it again,” Nicke threatens, beginning to shiver right along with him, hair stuck to his face with algae.

“I know,” Zhenya bites out. “Enough.”

Nicke splashes him for good measure. At least neither of them are missing any teeth this time. “Say it. Say I win.”

Zhenya curses at him. Nicke makes one more leap and dunks him a third time, only letting him up when he feels them both thump down on the bottom and he’s sure Zhenya has gotten a good mouthful of pond scum to convince him.

-

Nicke stills smells like pond water when he gets out of the shower, but at least he’s warm. He patches up the few miraculously small cuts from the glass door without too much trouble and heads downstairs. He’s already in the kitchen microwaving hot chocolate when Zhenya comes downstairs in borrowed clothes, sweatpants exposing a good eight centimetres of bony ankle and hoodie sleeves the same.

“Sit,” Nicke orders, pointing at a kitchen stool. Nicke waits until he’s done it to slide him a mug, sitting down across from him to drink his own.

Zhenya sniffs it suspiciously then seems to remember his nose might be broken and grimaces. He drinks it anyway, which Nicke considers a gesture of truce.

He’s not exactly good company, but Nicke isn’t helping. He’s too relieved at having bested him in some capacity to really bother trying to make conversation. “I win,” Nicke says, though, just so they’re on the same page. “Right?”

Zhenya grunts and takes another sip of his hot chocolate.

Nicke isn’t the kind of person to be bullied into speaking by an awkward silence, so he just finishes his drink and starts making himself another one. Zhenya will leave when he’s ready.

While Nicke’s back is turned, Zhenya clears his throat. “We are children together. It not like this with other people. Always first, with Sasha.”

Nicke finishes what he was doing, setting the microwave timer off and watching it turn. If his mother could see him doing it like this instead of on the stove she’d probably laugh at him, but she’s not here. When it dings, he turns back to Zhenya, waving _go on_ at him with his spoon.

Zhenya looks right at him, eyes narrowed. “You think Sasha is easy,” he says, a little bit of hot chocolate foam clinging to his lip. “Not true.”

 _Is that supposed to scare me?_ Nicke thinks. “I know that,” he says instead. “You want more?”

“You hurt him, I kill you,” Zhenya says, pushing his mug towards Nicke with one long arm. “Yes.”

“He was your first time?” Nicke asks, when he’s finished making him another cup. “You were his?”

“Careful,” Zhenya snarls. “We not friends.”

Nicke stirs the dregs of his hot chocolate, the thick sludge of sugar and cocoa at the bottom of his mug, suddenly reminded of pond water, kicked up to the surface. “I won’t bill you for the glass,” Nicke says. “Can you drive?”

Zhenya grunts, leaving his mug on the counter when he leaves without even asking if he should put it in the sink.

Nicke will probably never get those clothes back, but he decides to count it towards the win.

-

They lose the game in OT.

Nobody fights anybody.

Their win streak is over.

Nicke is furious at the loss, furious at the way the press ask questions about it, as though he personally planned it this way after extensive discussion among his teammates, no matter how little sense that makes.

Nicke is furious down to his bones for as long as it takes everyone else to feel it slipping off him like lava and disappear, melting away to their own lives out of his sight.

Nicke is furious until Sasha stands in front of him in the locker room, damp from the shower while Nicke still hasn’t taken one, more tired than he thinks he’s ever been.

Sasha looks down at him with a strange expression on his face, a searching look in his eyes. He offers Nicke a hand without a word. Nicke takes it. Holds it. Squeezes. “I beat him,” Nicke whispers. “Just…not on the ice. I wanted to really—”

“You smell so bad,” Sasha says softly. “Like…bad vegetables. Old borscht. Like—”

Nicke starts to laugh, a wheeze deep in his chest that becomes a shout before he notices. “I know.”

“Fish market after morning,” Sasha continues, louder over Nicke’s laugh. “Greenie’s socks.”

“I threw him in my water feature,” Nicke blurts, still holding Sasha’s hand, relief crashing through him like a cold wave. “Oh my god, I tried to drown him.”

Sasha crushes his knuckles in his huge palm, pulling him to his feet. “You win,” he says, laughter lingering in his eyes as the sound fades down to nothing, just the rush of blood in Nicke’s ears left as Sasha tilts his chin up to kiss him.

It’s so good; it’s the heat of his mouth and the chill of Nicke’s cold sweat, the taste of him after a game and the way he pulls back for breath just to kiss him again, soft and small, even though he still smells like the unspeakable bottom layer of an ornamental pond.

-

Nicke takes his third shower that day in such a record time that he thinks it should be acknowledged. The acrid scent of the locker room soap is all over him, the lasting, familiar smell clinging to his hair. He doesn’t care at all, throwing on the clothes he brought with him so quickly he can barely tell one item from another.

Sasha is waiting patiently, not even playing with his phone. He’s just sitting there in the empty locker room, hands hanging between his knees, chains peeking through the gap in his sweatshirt where he’s cut the collar away, watching Nicke as he comes back. 

When Nicke was nineteen it felt like he was always being watched; trainers and coaches and reporters all looking, strangers all wanting him to talk more, to grow into their expectations. Nicke doesn’t feel much older some days, but others, he looks back at himself and can see exactly what took him through that first year, when he could hardly force a word out. Sasha watched him too, but it was without the weight of expectation. Sasha already knew they’d be a perfect fit on the ice. Sasha was happy to put the words in his mouth and Nicke was happy to leave them there. _We’ll see what happen_ Nicke had said to some microphone too close to his face. It was the only honest answer he could have given, even if he can’t remember the question.

Nicke thinks he might be able to put away the note, now, the crumpled paper he’s been hiding in the nightstand until he doesn’t need it anymore.

_Learn to fight._

He might have written it years too late. Fighting to stay was the part that mattered.

The back of his neck prickles, all the hair beginning to stand up on the thin sliver of his wrists still exposed to the air, blood in his body trying to decide where to pool.

His skin feels fragile, as though a single touch might split him open. “Take me home,” he says.

Sasha does.

-

Nicke has been practically living at Sasha’s for months now, both of them in each other's pockets, forming the habits that become muscle memory before you notice —the way Sasha figures out right away how Nicke takes his corrosively strong coffee, the way Nicke discovers Sasha sometimes wraps his fingers in his necklace while he’s sleeping and every so often jerks himself awake by accident— and when. Nicke drags him through the door it almost feels like home.

It has almost nothing to do with the house and everything to do with how Sasha is right up against his chest in an instant, hands working up under Nicke’s shirt to brush at the bare skin above his hips before he’s ever shrugged his jacket off. Nicke’s hair is still damp under his hat, his breath coming fast and still misting in the air before the door swings shut behind them.

Nicke grabs his hat off and drops it somewhere, stepping back just enough to get a good look at Sasha’s face.

Sasha is watching him, hands still raised, as though guarding the space Nicke left between them. Nicke doesn’t think he’ll make it to the bedroom before he touches him again. “Ready?” Nicke asks, nonsensically. “For real?”

Sasha lowers his hands, unzipping his jacket slowly enough that Nicke wonders if he’s doing it on purpose or if he’s moving as though Nicke is a wild animal he doesn’t want to scare. “You want wait a little more? Tomorrow? You tired?” His voice cracks on a laugh before he's even finished saying it, and then Nicke is on him, taking two smooth steps in to meet him, kissing him with too many teeth for a first time. Their first time was years ago. Sasha can take it.

He doesn’t bet on Sasha’s sheer weight, the way he takes hold of him and rushes forward, carrying Nicke right back until they collapse on the hellishly uncomfortable carpeted stairs. Nicke has a moment to be thankful Sasha hasn’t decided on hardwood before his mind starts to go blank, that soft-edged fuzz of pure _want_ he’s been keeping at bay for far too long.

Sasha pulls back just enough to brace himself up, hands on uneven stairs, hair sticking up all over from where Nicke has grabbed it. “Here?” he asks, leaning in to punctuate it with another short kiss. “Now?”

Nicke seriously considers screaming. every part of his body feels overused already, the bruises on his throat throbbing time with his heartbeat, shock that he hasn’t already come all over himself filtering through the mess of sensation he can’t seem to untangle.

Not here. Not now. He’s waited this long.

“Upstairs,” Nicke forces out, wondering if he’s already too hard to move, whether that’s even possible. “Now.”

Sasha, somehow, filled with impossibility, drags Nicke bodily up one more stair before he starts kissing him again, little flash of pain from his teeth an echo of earlier, a century ago when they were still standing. Nicke yanks his hair again, pulling Sasha back. He kisses him once more just so they’re on the same page before he shoves him away, turning to get purchase on the stairs.

Every step is agony. It doesn't help that Sasha puts a hand on the back of his neck, resting hot and heavy, fingers twisting little circles into the damp down at the case of his scalp, shivery curls of anticipation slashing through him.

Nicke knows this house in the dark now. He’s known it in the day for years, but there’s a particular intimacy to not having to turn the lights on somewhere, to knowing where someone’s bed is. Nicke can feel the little draft from the window Sasha never closes, a welcome breath of cold before Sasha is crowding him towards the bed.

Sasha tumbles onto the bed with him, pressing him back until Sasha is laying half on top of him, big palm flat to his stomach under his shirt, one of his huge knees thrown across Nicke’s thighs. Sasha presses a kiss at the base of his throat, stroking over the purple streak close to the surface where Zhenya choked him. He doesn’t say anything, but Nicke thinks he knows him well enough to know what he’s keeping back.

Nicke lets him until he doesn’t. “Stop.”

Sasha stops, one hand down on the mattress, pressing deep into the covers. “You okay?”

Is he okay? Nicke doesn’t have an answer for that in just words. He can’t remember when he last got a chance to look at Sasha like this, lit by the faint glow of distant street lights and the horrible green numbers on the alarm clock he still uses. Nicke can’t remember when he’s ever been able to just look. No distractions. Nothing in the way. Well, one thing. “You getting undressed?” Nicke asks, hoarsely.

“Not yet,” Sasha says, moving his thumb in a steady sweep, raising goosebumps all over Nicke’s body. “Nicke.” Hearing him say his name has never shot through him like this, never pressed against his frayed edges this way before. It feels new, all of a sudden. “What you want?”

For a second, all Nicke can do is lie there and breathe, full to the brim with need he has no words for. “Fuck,” he mutters, throwing an arm over his eyes, letting the weight of his elbow block out the light. “I want to _come._ ”

Sasha chuckles into the side of his face. “How?”

“It’s not rocket science.”

Sasha’s hand on his belly creeps a little bit lower, little scratches of his blunt nails catching at the faint hair Nicke only barely has. “You tell me, make me wait. Remember? I do this for so long, maybe I don’t remember how not.”

Nicke lets the light back in. His whole body is strung up tight like a bow, Sasha pinning him down, heat of him all around, his big hands and familiar voice right _there._ Nicke wants to— fuck, consume him, maybe, except the feeling isn’t quite there, it’s not that kind of untempered hunger. “Do you remember how to fuck?” Nicke asks him, surprised at the steadiness of his own voice as he takes hold of Sasha’s wrist, halting his slow meander under Nicke’s waistband. “Or this just for scoring goals now?”

Sasha kisses the corner of his mouth, the edge of his cheekbone, the small bruise under his eye. “Maybe I say no, make you wait one more night.”

“I’m leaving you,” Nicke says. “I’m going to go to Mike’s and jerk off.”

“Not allowed.” Nicke is about to say something he’ll never be able to take back when Sasha twists out of his grip and grabs his hand, fingers lacing together as he pins it to the mattress, rolling over so all his weight is on Nicke, pressing down on him, and Nicke has to swallow back the sudden feeling that his skin might burst, a lightness in his chest finally pushing his ribs up, taking the first real breath he’s noticed in months. Sasha is so heavy, so near, so absolutely real, and there’s nobody else here. Ghosts, maybe. Old friends. Whoever they used to be. But those are all spectres, not bodies. Not Sasha, reaching for his other wrist and holding it gently, pinning him all the way down. “Nicke,” Sasha says again. “You win.”

Yes. Yes he does. He won before any of this nonsense even started, when Sasha let him try in the first place. Nicke swallows hard against the tightness in his throat. “Long time ago,” he manges. “Don’t make me beg.”

Sasha doesn’t.

It’s not the first time they’ve done this. It was never going to be. Nicke wouldn’t _want_ it to. It’s better, knowing his body and Sasha’s body and how they fit already. It's still the first time Nicke has ever let anyone work him open so slowly he thinks he’s going to shake out of his skin. It’s still the first time he’s ever let anyone—

Not anyone. Sasha, watching his face the whole time, still torturing him, slow, shallow strokes like Nicke can’t take more, like he isn’t almost about to lose his mind from the way Sasha’s chains have settled on his chest, gold warm between them, Nicke’s hands somehow laced in with Sasha’s. Nicke’s absolutely furious dick so hard it hurts, an ache trapped at the base of his spine, every slight press of Sasha’s heavy belly making Nicke want more of him, all of it. It’s almost what he imagines a first time might be like, if first times were ever good and awful like this, in this specific, desperate way.

It’s too much. It’s not enough. If there was any justice in the world Nicke would have come the instant Sasha put his fingers in him. The fact that he hasn’t is another mystery, a new, strange bridge between himself and his body he’s never crossed.

“What’s the matter?” Sasha asks, knowing perfectly well what the matter is. Nicke glares at him. Sasha leans down, almost still, so that Nicke can feel his breath on his lips, his mouth close enough to bite.

Nicke could struggle. Nicke could make it one more fight, make this game into one they’ve played before. Or he could ask for what he wants, the release he’s been craving to be between them, for Sasha to be the one to give it to him. He’s waited months already, giving his release over to Sasha for safekeeping, something like a promise that Sasha could give it back.

Nicke thinks that— yeah, he could. That’s the part he wants most. “Tell me I can come.”

Sasha’s whole body twitches. “Oh, fuck—”

“Sasha.” Nicke disentangles his hands, Sasha holding so still Nicke thinks he might shatter. He grabs his face, staring right into his eyes. “ _Tell me I can come._ ”

“Yes,” Sasha whispers, hoarse and low, “yes, you can, fuck, you can come.”

“You have to fucking move,” Nicke reminds him, not filled to the brim yet but almost. Almost ready.

Sasha does. The first deep stroke sends Nicke over the edge. It’s only the first time.

-

The second and third, Nicke barely remembers. 

A hockey season isn’t the best time to have a whole night of sleepless fucking, but they make it work. 

Somewhere in there Nicke thinks maybe he’s going to go from one extreme to the the other, spend himself so thoroughly he’ll never be quite the same. 

Even if that’s not physically true, there might be something to it when Sasha kisses him full on the mouth again with the taste of Nicke’s own skin still heavy on his tongue, nothing but the two of them together. 

“Can’t believe you make me wait,” Sasha says, an overused rasp in the back of his throat, vibration of his voice a physical jolt against Nicke’s sternum. “Not the same without you.”

Nicke can’t do anything but haul in a shaky breath, pawing clumsily at ay part of Sasha he can reach, as though keeping him this close could last forever.

-

Nicke wakes up sore all over, a litany of ignored injuries clamouring for attention after a couple hours of grace. His throat hurts. He moves a leg and regrets it, wondering if he’ll ever stand in one go again. One day his body might forgive him. 

Sasha is sacked out on his side, head pillowed on his left arm, Nicke absently leaning against his back, the better to feel the solid, painfully human rhythm of his breathing, the rise and fall of his ribs. Nicke can tell he’s awake from the way his breath has deepened. Sasha sleeps more restlessly than most. 

He can’t quite believe it’s real, even though there’s an awful, sticky sheen of sweat between them and Nicke desperately needs to get up and go to the bathroom.

“You awake?” Sasha mumbles, shifting a little, a seismic slide of his shoulders.

“Maybe. Haven’t decided.”

“Must be awake, you never this sweaty in dreams.”

“Fuck,” Nicke breathes against the back of his neck, trying to remember how to speak in the light of the morning, emptied out of everything but the sensation of waking up with him. “I don’t want to move. I thought my balls were gonna— just, explode.”

He can feel it through his whole body when Sasha hums thoughtfully. “Maybe you do to me next time.”

Nicke was just thinking he’d never get hard again, but look at that, turns out he's at least a little bit wrong. “Think you could stand it?”

Sasha rolls over, dragging a finger through the mess they’ve left on Nicke’s belly, pressing his thumb into the softness of his skin, kneading a little. Nike is sure he’s emptied out, cored, but it still feels possible, like they’ve got nothing but time. “So mean,” Sasha says wonderingly. “Do this to me, tell me to make you wait. You think is easy? I want to see your face every time, want to tell you to let me help. It’s torture for me, too. Never get to make you feel good.”

“Answer the question,” Nicke says, full of something that wants to come out as a laugh.

“Mean,” Sasha repeats, tweaking his nipple for emphasis. “Fight so many people you can’t stop, want to fight me now.”

Nicke swats his hand away and then holds it, stroking his thumb over Sasha’s broad knuckles, every scar on them familiar until the next one forms. “You did make me feel good.”

“And then bad,” Sasha points out. “Should see your face. Terrible.”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

Sasha laughs at him, a quiet huff Nicke wants to bottle and listen to again. “Yeah, that time when Maria show up, with tie was pretty fun. Like a present.”

Nicke feels the flush creep over his chest and decides not to care. They can talk about that later. “I never want to throw a punch again,” he confesses, beginning to feel his laundry list of aches. “One or two, maybe. No more.”

“Okay,” Sasha agrees. “You start, I finish. We win.”

-

**Author's Note:**

> NOTES: this fic features a lot of fighting. NHL fighting, regular ol’ fisticuffs, the art of pugilism done badly and one attempted drowning. It is very, very stupid. None of these timelines make sense, though it is set nominally around 2012 when (I assume for my own amusement) Nicklas Backstrom still had a flip phone, and while I did look up the roster that year and their playing schedule, I very much didn’t stick to it. “Whoops.” 
> 
> None of this is real, including hockey. (The Capitals Are Stanley Cup Champions!!!!)
> 
> Thank you so much to my partners in crime who I cannot name yet because it would reveal me immediately, but please know this wouldn’t be readable without them, or, indeed, finished at all. Their gentle filth consultation and general encouragement has been essential. Cherish your friends.


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